The Long and Short

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford introduce their series on long poems and short stories from the 19th and 20th centuries, and talk about some of the ideas which will underpin their twelve episodes. The authors discussed in the series will be: Alfred Tennyson, Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Nella Larson, Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Ted Hughes and Alice Oswald.

Mark Ford and Seamus Perry start their series, The Long and Short, with Tennyson’s ‘Maud’, a weird and disturbing poem about obsession that Tennyson himself was obsessed by. He would recite it in full at the drop of a hat, sometimes more than once, to friends and foes alike – even though it received notoriously bad reviews when it was published. This episode considers why the poem meant so much to him, and what it tells us about the Victorian age. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/tlasapple⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/tlassignuppod⁠ Read more on Tennyson in the LRB: Seamus Perry: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n02/seamus-perry/are-we-there-yet Danny Karlin: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n20/danny-karlin/tennyson-s-text

In the second episode of the series, Mark and Seamus turn to ‘Song of Myself’, for Mark 'one of the most exciting things literature has to offer'. They discuss the extraordinary physicality and exuberance of this seminal American poem, its relationship with urbanism, capitalism and sexuality, and its Johnny Appleseed-spirit, among many other things. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/tlasapple⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/tlassignuppod⁠

The third episode turns to the short stories of Henry James, looking in particular at ‘The Aspern Papers’ which, like Tennyson’s ‘Maud’, offers a diagnosis of obsession, in this case through a sensuous, excruciating and often comedic Venetian psychodrama. Mark and Seamus discuss the emergence of the short story at the end of the 19th century, and how certain features of the form – its attachment to unresolved endings, its debt to the dramatic monologue – can be found in James’s own stories, along with his other major themes, such as the tortured relationship between the public and private, and the experience of Americans in Europe. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/tlasapple⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/tlassignuppod⁠

In episode four, we turn to the squarely modernist Katherine Mansfield, whose writing famously attracted the envy of Virginia Woolf. Mark and Seamus discuss the decisive break modernist story makes from its 19th century predecessors, exemplified in Mansfield’s work. At turns lyrical, ruthless, moving and darkly comic, these stories demonstrate her knack for close observation and mimicry – no wonder one of them is Mark’s ‘desert island’ story. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/tlasapple⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/tlassignuppod⁠

In their fifth episode, Mark and Seamus reach their first 20th century poet of the series, the Ohio-born, New York-loving ad man Hart Crane, and his epic 1930 work The Bridge. Directly inspired by The Waste Land, The Bridge sought to address modernity, as Eliot had done, with all its conflicts, contradictions and difficulties, but infuse it with a Whitman-esque expression of American greatness. Mark and Seamus discuss Crane’s multi-faceted mythologisation of the bridge, the baroque complexity of his language, the deployment of Robert Browning and Gerard Manley Hopkins in service of his questing American origin story, and the personal struggles of a man who, for his brief life, found himself in the exhilarating creative centre of modernist experimentation. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/tlasapple⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/tlassignuppod⁠ Read more in the LRB: ⁠Adam Philips: Roaring Boy⁠ ⁠Michael Hofmann: Three Poems⁠ ⁠Mark Ford: Two Poems

Controversial, compulsive, and overwhelmingly charismatic, D.H. Lawrence continues to exert an undeniable magnetism through his novels and poetry. But, as Mark argues in this episode, the quintessential Lawrence lies in his shorter fiction. Focusing on five stories that span Lawrence’s career, Mark and Seamus discuss the strange mix of uninhibitedness and meticulous detail that make Lawrence’s work essential reading. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/tlasapple⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/tlassignuppod⁠ Stories discussed in this episode: ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ ‘The Prussian Officer’ ‘England, my England’ ‘The Blind Man’ ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’

Seamus and Mark step into the counterculture with two long poems, ‘Howl’ and ‘Kaddish’, by Allen Ginsberg, a Beat poet-celebrity with a utopian vision for an America rescued from its corrupted institutions and vested interests. Published in 1956, ‘Howl’ influenced post-war culture like no other literary work, a mind-expanded free-verse jeremiad that is also a celebratory poem of absolute ruin, it offered a restless generation a seductive escape from what Lowell called the ‘tranquillised fifties’. In his intensely confessional 1961 poem ‘Kaddish’, a eulogy to his dead mother, Ginsberg offered a graphic account of his traumatic childhood and evolution that plugged directly into his era’s obsession with subjectivity. Seamus and Mark discuss some of Ginsberg’s influences – including Whitman, Carlos Williams, O’Hara and Blake – and the far-reaching impact of his work, as well as Mark’s own experiences meeting the poet. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/tlasapple⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/tlassignuppod⁠

James Joyce wrote most of the short stories in his landmark collection, Dubliners, when he was still in his 20s, but a tortuous publishing history, during which printers refused or pulped them for their profanity, meant they weren’t published until 1914, when Joyce was 33. In their eighth episode, Mark and Seamus discuss the astonishing confidence of Joyce’s early work, which not only launched his literary career, but also initiated the grand project of his writing life. In Dubliners, the reader experiences already the vastness of Joyce’s literary imagination, his harsh criticism of the Catholic Church, his shameless plundering of the lives of his contemporaries, and a writer’s self-conscious vocation to ‘forge the uncreated conscience of his race’. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/tlasapple⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/tlassignuppod⁠ Stories discussed in this episode: 'The Sisters' 'Clay' 'Two Gallants' 'A Little Cloud' 'A Painful Case' 'Ivy Day in the Committee Room' 'The Dead' Further reading in the LRB: ⁠John Bayley: Our Founder⁠ ⁠Tim Parks: Joyce and Company⁠ ⁠Roy Foster: tarry easty⁠ ⁠Colm Tóibín: His Spittin' Image

Originally conceived as a film script, Gaudete is Ted Hughes’s apocalyptic vision of an English village in the throes of pagan forces. While it may be ‘the weirdest poem by a very weird poet’, as Mark puts it in this episode, Gaudete shines a light on many Hughesian preoccupations and paved the way for his best-selling collection, Birthday Letters. A strange fusion of Twin Peaks and Midsomer Murders, Gaudete is the former Poet Laureate at his most uninhibited and brilliant. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/tlasapple⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/tlassignuppod⁠

In the tenth episode of the series, Seamus and Mark turn to two figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Nella Larsen’s Passing is a taut, tense and tartly stylish take on the Jamesian short story, redolent with ironies and ambiguities, that feels just as relevant today. Widely considered his masterwork, Langston Hughes’s ‘Montage of a Dream Deferred’ draws on the modernist tradition, a documentarian sensibility and the freedoms of bebop to capture the multiplicity of Harlem voices. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/tlasapple⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/tlassignuppod⁠ Further reading in the LRB: ⁠Amber Medland: They Roared with Laughter⁠ ⁠Lewis Nkosi: An Unamerican in New York⁠ ⁠James Campbell: White Lies⁠ ⁠Joanna Biggs: What She Wasn't

The eleventh episode of the Long and Short brings us to the present day and the distant past, as we turn to two multivocal, monumental poems by Alice Oswald. The dazzlingly polyphonic Dart (2002) celebrates the voices of the river Dart, and the people, animals and supernatural forces entwined with it. Memorial (2011) translates and transfigures the Iliad, stripping back the narrative to reveal the epic’s ‘bright unbearable reality’. Mark and Seamus explore the thematic throughlines in Oswald’s work, unpicking allusions and influences at play in these poems. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/tlasapple⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/tlassignuppod⁠ Further reading in the LRB: ⁠Colin Burrow: On Alice Oswald⁠ ⁠Aingeal Clare: Outcanoeuvre⁠ ⁠Ange Mlinko: Good Jar, Bad Jar⁠ ⁠Alice Oswald: Two Poems

In the final episode of the Long and Short, we turn to Elizabeth Bowen, widely considered one of the finest writers of the short story. Mark and Seamus unpack ‘the Bowen effect’ and her singularly haunting style: subtle social commentary cut through with humour, and occasionally outright romanticism. A culmination of the short fiction explored in this series, Bowen’s work proves that life ‘with the lid on’ can be just as exhilarating, moving and funny as any sensationalist story. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/tlasapple⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/tlassignuppod⁠ Stories discussed in this episode: ‘The Parrot’ ‘Joining Charles’ ‘The Needlecase’ ‘Mysterious Kôr’ ‘The Demon Lover’ Further reading in the LRB: ⁠⁠John Bayley⁠⁠ ⁠⁠David Trotter⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Tessa Hadley⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Sean O'Faolain⁠